I appreciate the thoughtfulness of much of this column. What I don't appreciate is the creepy comment about transgender creepiness (please spare us your bigotry toward trans people) and the arrogant pretension to know what the director's motives are (mind read much?).
What’s creepy to me (well, creepy is almost never a good analytical word) is you being creeped out guy a different point of view regarding Elliot Page. You’re too free with the “bigotry” slur.
You've just shot yourself in the foot, Tim, by implying that your own comment is creepy. As for bigotry, finding an entire group creepy, regardless of individual differences among their members, is a classic example of bigotry. Just substitute "black man" or "Jew" or "Muslim" or "woman with short hair who aren't traditionally feminine." You're too free with your dismissal of the bigotry slur, though I actually agree with you that the slur is sometimes unfair. Sneering at trans people isn't one of the times.
Note that I did not say or imply that trans people are somehow second class citizens or should be deprived of their rights to live their lives as they please.
I said creepy. Perhaps not the best choice of words.
What are your thoughts on this:
“Aversions to visible physical disabilities are recognized by evolutionary and social psychologists not as inherent malice, but as an intersection of over-inclusive evolutionary disease-avoidance mechanisms (Park et al., 2003) alongside social conditioning and existential anxieties regarding human fragility (American Psychological Association, 2021)."
Your next argument will no doubt be that trans is not a physical disability. Debatable. Amputations are though, which brings us to this:
"An aversion to people with visible disabilities, amputations, or malformed limbs is a common human psychological reaction, typically rooted in evolutionary biology, social conditioning, and personal anxieties rather than inherent malice."
Definitely not the best choice of words. While we're talking about irrational aversions, consider my own analogies: someone's being creeped out by black men, etc. Those analogies seem to me much more accurate than yours involving amputations etc. Let's be real: Elliot Page is a transman who looks like a biological man; you basically have admitted that you wouldn't react to him as you did if he weren't transgender. So any creepiness you detect is your own discomfort with transgender identity--a discomfort so great you find it worthy of serious mention in a mostly thoughtful column about a major controversial movie. Anyone who feels the same way as you is a bigot too: bigotry loves company. You and they no doubt have good qualities; I'm not saying you're evil. But what you said was contemptible, and your analogies were contemptible too. And the reason (at least in part) is that it never seems to have crossed your mind how hurtful what you have said is or would be to many transgender people, or how you promote hostility to them.. And no, I'm not trans, but I have friends who are, and I know how they feel about people like you--people they encounter on a regular basis. Please reconsider your behavior and your defense of it.
Let’s put aside the “creepiness” and the “bigotry” and try to find out what we both believe.
Here’s what I believe:
- Call yourself whatever you want.
- I have the right to call you by whatever gender pronoun I like. If you don’t like it, you can call me rude.
- Dress however you want.
- I get to look at you with disgust/disdain. If you don’t like it, you can call me rude.
- Women’s bathrooms are for biological women.
- Women’s sports are for biological women.
Note: I hate the term “biological women” because it implies that there’s any other kind. However, if we’re going to communicate, I will have to use this term as we disagree on what constitutes a woman.
The “it is/it isn’t a mental disease” argument is largely a sideshow for two reasons:
1. If the scientific consensus suddenly switched and they all said transgenderism was a disease you would still maintain that it isn’t. That’s fine. You believe what you believe and I’ll believe what I believe. What takes place in a person's head is fundamentally unprovable. This leads to the next reason.
2. How do you differentiate between someone who claims to be trans and someone who’s just a creep who wants to sit in girls changerooms?
I'm going to focus on the consensus issue and the restroom/locker room issues.
(a) Regarding consensus, you could just as well ask what a supporter of the humanly caused climate change theory (or evolution, or continental drift, or polio vaccine effectiveness) would do if the consensus suddenly reversed. Would that make nonspecialist appeals to the actual consensus "largely a sideshow"? Seriously???
(b) Regarding what's in the mind: proof in the sense of conclusive evidence is a red herring. There is abundant evidence for many psychological claims in ordinary life and psychology. If you really mean that there's no good evidence for such claims, common sense and the science of psychology refute you. P.S. It's ironic that in your column you talked as if you knew Nolan's motives in making the movie.
(c) The unsupported proclamation that women's bathrooms are for biological women is not a rational argument, much like the Jim Crow proclamation that bathrooms that white people use are not for black people. We decide as a society and via our legal systems whom bathrooms are for. And we do so by examining considerations of fairness and the consequences of different arrangements. You mention one such consideration regarding the safety of cisgender women and girls, and I'll return to it. You don't trouble yourself to mention the safety of transgender women, who face real danger in men's bathrooms. You might ask yourself too how a trans man who looks just like a cis man (as most trans men apparently do) would fare in women's restrooms. P.S. The only study I'm aware of regarding cis man trying to pass as trans men in women's restrooms in order to harass or attack them found that there are no documented cases of this happening.
(c) I think locker rooms pose a more challenging case than restrooms. I do have sympathy for cis women and especially girls who are or would be unsettled by the sight of male genitalia in those settings (given that something like 90% of American transwomen have not had "bottom surgery"). Shower curtains are one solution. But we should always keep in mind that safety matters more than comfort.
(d) The unsupported proclamation that women's sports are for biological women faces similar difficulties; again the considerations of fairness and consequences that you ignore are crucial. The only real argument for the claim is that transwomen athletes have an unfair biological advantage over cis women athletes. I think this argument must be taken seriously and is indeed plausible. It's a complicated issue--much more complicated than most supporters seem to realize. The scientific debate over the biological-advantage issue has not, so far as I know, been resolved. (Similar debates have taken place, btw, concerning cis female athletes with naturally elevated testosterone levels. Many opponents of transfemale athletes in competitive women's sports seem not even to recognize that these athletes must take testosterone suppressants for several years in order to be allowed to compete. )
(e) I could go on for pages; I've given talks on the restroom and sports issues. But that's hardly appropriate here, and in any case I don't really want to spend the time. Indeed I've reached my limit in our debate. Perhaps it was unwise or even unfair for me to call you a bigot. But I get angry when marginalized people are thoughtlessly demeaned, and I feel dutibound to stand up for them. (For the record I also stand up for non-marginalized people, such as men under attack by misandrists, Jews under attack by antisemites, and white people under attack for being members of a "oppressor class".)
> Let's be real: Elliot Page is a transman who looks like a biological man
Wait, which are we doing? Being "real" or making the second declaration? Page looks exactly like what he is, which is "a petite chick who has undergone major constructive surgery". Trying to oversell it the way you are loses the bid. He certainly hasn't achieved Buck Angel levels of transformation, and mastectomy scars aren't particularly masculine. At best, Page looks like a tween boy.
I made no such implication about my own comment. I made a “meta” comment about the use of “creepy,” which you later elaborated on. I did imply that we shouldn’t jump the moral gun and presuppose that any discussion of how one feels about classes of people is automatically bigotry = (for me) unthinking prejudice. You can’t avoid such “bigotry” yourself, automatically condemning Mr. Black Flag for his views as a bigot. He may be ultimately misguided, but shutting down discussion with absolute certainty is also unthinking and more patience is better. Your comment on his admittedly thoughtful discussion completely sidetracked the discussion.
People who think they're kittens or puppies or born in the wrong body are creepy, the same way that a mentally-ill homeless person covered in shit on the L Train is creepy. The left wants to degrade all of our evolved threat-detection capabilities and then run roughshod over us.
The idea that transgender identity is a mental illness is so profoundly ignorant that it qualifies as bigotry on steroids. Every major medical and psychological organization in the U.S. that has taken a stand on transgender identity has denied that it is a mental illness. I'm talking about the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics; likewise btw for the World Health Organization. And what exactly are your qualifications, baby daddy, for diagnosing transgender people? I should add that your evidence-free insinuation that trans people pose a threat just makes your bigotry worse.
These same groups endorsed lobotomies. As well as many useful medical procedures.
There is fashion in medicine and science, as elsewhere. But this is more basic, an argument about the nature of reality. It is no use calling everyone who disagrees with you a ‘bigot’. And saying so with long Latin-based words makes it no more use.
There's the nature of "reality" argument and there's the "mental illness" argument.
The interesting thing about "illness" is that we would normally agree that anything that prevents a person from reproducing would, broadly speaking, constitute a disease. If the desire to take take hormones to "fix" your body and thereby render yourself sterile isn't evidence of a disease, I don't know what is.
Your list proves less than you think. The American Psychiatric Association publishes the DSM, and gender dysphoria is in it, right now, in the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). What those organizations actually say is that being trans is not itself a disorder but the distress associated with it is a diagnosable condition. That is a real distinction, not the blanket denial you just described.
The WHO point cuts the same way. ICD-11 moved gender incongruence out of the mental disorders chapter, but it kept it as a diagnosis under conditions related to sexual health (World Health Organization, 2019). Reclassified, not removed. And the WHO said openly that retaining a code was necessary to preserve access to care, which is a coverage and financing rationale sitting alongside the scientific one.
Consensus statements are not evidence, they are summaries of it. Homosexuality left the DSM in 1973 after a process that involved a membership vote and sustained activist pressure, documented in detail by a sympathetic historian (Bayer, 1981). That was the right call. It was still a decision made by people, not a lab result. Citing that these bodies have taken a position tells me what they concluded, not why.
The consensus also is not global. England's independent review of youth gender services found the evidence base for pediatric medical transition weak and recommended extreme caution (Cass, 2024), and health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and Norway have tightened protocols after their own systematic reviews. Reasonable clinicians disagree.
Asking my credentials is not an argument. Neither is calling me a bigot. Address the claim
Your own initial examples and tone supported the bigotry charge. But let me indeed address your more thoughtful discussion in your reply. (a) Consensus statements are indeed evidence: indirect evidence to which nonspecialists can legitimately appeal. None of us, I'd wager, is a climate scientist, so we are wise to rely on the overwhelming climate-science consensus that humanly caused global warming is real. All this makes my request for your credentials relevant; but you're entitled of course to offer reasons for doubting the reliability of the consensus. (b) You're misunderstanding the consensus view on gender "dysphoria" (now called gender incongruence apparently to avoid an implication of mental illness for tran people generally). The dysphoria is produced by the existence of transgender identity in a hostile or unsympathetic society (including btw people like you). The dysphoria basically ends when the trans person is able to live in relative peace as a trans person. It matters that most people who transition don't regret it. (c) The pediatric concerns about YOUTH transitioning are entirely irrelevant to the point I have made about the mental healthiness of transgender identity in general. I think those concerns are reasonable, especially as raised in the Cass Report from England. I take no stand on whether trans youth should at least for now be denied access to puberty blockers, for instance. But I would note that Dr. Cass said explicitly that there are indeed trans youth who would benefit from transitioning when old enough to make an informed decision. She NEVER claims or implies that transgender identity is a mental illness. I do think she's right that social contagion explains some of the popularity of youthful identifications of biological girls and boys as trans. (d) Lab reports, so far as I know, have nothing to do with the issue of whether transgender identity is a mental illness. (e) It's heartening to see you reject the traditional view of homosexuality as a mental illness. Two points about it: we can call that view a social prejudice, and thus a form of bigotry, when it was and is based on indefensible misconceptions (typically quite ugly) about gay people. Sure, psychologists often accepted them too. But the few arguments for the view were godawful, and there is reason to think that the psychologists were influenced by the social prejudices. (Precisely the same point applies to the very common racism in psychology.) I do nevertheless find myself wondering if you would have mocked gay people back before the early 1970s' psychologists' renunciation of the mental-lllness claim about them. Judging from your earlier anti-trans mockery, the answer would seem to be yes. If you want others to avoid that conclusion, dude, skip the mockery--and not just for your sake but from compassion for its targets.....
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of much of this column. What I don't appreciate is the creepy comment about transgender creepiness (please spare us your bigotry toward trans people) and the arrogant pretension to know what the director's motives are (mind read much?).
What’s creepy to me (well, creepy is almost never a good analytical word) is you being creeped out guy a different point of view regarding Elliot Page. You’re too free with the “bigotry” slur.
You've just shot yourself in the foot, Tim, by implying that your own comment is creepy. As for bigotry, finding an entire group creepy, regardless of individual differences among their members, is a classic example of bigotry. Just substitute "black man" or "Jew" or "Muslim" or "woman with short hair who aren't traditionally feminine." You're too free with your dismissal of the bigotry slur, though I actually agree with you that the slur is sometimes unfair. Sneering at trans people isn't one of the times.
I'm a bigot, eh?
Interesting take.
Note that I did not say or imply that trans people are somehow second class citizens or should be deprived of their rights to live their lives as they please.
I said creepy. Perhaps not the best choice of words.
What are your thoughts on this:
“Aversions to visible physical disabilities are recognized by evolutionary and social psychologists not as inherent malice, but as an intersection of over-inclusive evolutionary disease-avoidance mechanisms (Park et al., 2003) alongside social conditioning and existential anxieties regarding human fragility (American Psychological Association, 2021)."
Your next argument will no doubt be that trans is not a physical disability. Debatable. Amputations are though, which brings us to this:
"An aversion to people with visible disabilities, amputations, or malformed limbs is a common human psychological reaction, typically rooted in evolutionary biology, social conditioning, and personal anxieties rather than inherent malice."
I doubt I am the only person who feels this way.
Definitely not the best choice of words. While we're talking about irrational aversions, consider my own analogies: someone's being creeped out by black men, etc. Those analogies seem to me much more accurate than yours involving amputations etc. Let's be real: Elliot Page is a transman who looks like a biological man; you basically have admitted that you wouldn't react to him as you did if he weren't transgender. So any creepiness you detect is your own discomfort with transgender identity--a discomfort so great you find it worthy of serious mention in a mostly thoughtful column about a major controversial movie. Anyone who feels the same way as you is a bigot too: bigotry loves company. You and they no doubt have good qualities; I'm not saying you're evil. But what you said was contemptible, and your analogies were contemptible too. And the reason (at least in part) is that it never seems to have crossed your mind how hurtful what you have said is or would be to many transgender people, or how you promote hostility to them.. And no, I'm not trans, but I have friends who are, and I know how they feel about people like you--people they encounter on a regular basis. Please reconsider your behavior and your defense of it.
Let’s put aside the “creepiness” and the “bigotry” and try to find out what we both believe.
Here’s what I believe:
- Call yourself whatever you want.
- I have the right to call you by whatever gender pronoun I like. If you don’t like it, you can call me rude.
- Dress however you want.
- I get to look at you with disgust/disdain. If you don’t like it, you can call me rude.
- Women’s bathrooms are for biological women.
- Women’s sports are for biological women.
Note: I hate the term “biological women” because it implies that there’s any other kind. However, if we’re going to communicate, I will have to use this term as we disagree on what constitutes a woman.
The “it is/it isn’t a mental disease” argument is largely a sideshow for two reasons:
1. If the scientific consensus suddenly switched and they all said transgenderism was a disease you would still maintain that it isn’t. That’s fine. You believe what you believe and I’ll believe what I believe. What takes place in a person's head is fundamentally unprovable. This leads to the next reason.
2. How do you differentiate between someone who claims to be trans and someone who’s just a creep who wants to sit in girls changerooms?
Your turn.
I'm going to focus on the consensus issue and the restroom/locker room issues.
(a) Regarding consensus, you could just as well ask what a supporter of the humanly caused climate change theory (or evolution, or continental drift, or polio vaccine effectiveness) would do if the consensus suddenly reversed. Would that make nonspecialist appeals to the actual consensus "largely a sideshow"? Seriously???
(b) Regarding what's in the mind: proof in the sense of conclusive evidence is a red herring. There is abundant evidence for many psychological claims in ordinary life and psychology. If you really mean that there's no good evidence for such claims, common sense and the science of psychology refute you. P.S. It's ironic that in your column you talked as if you knew Nolan's motives in making the movie.
(c) The unsupported proclamation that women's bathrooms are for biological women is not a rational argument, much like the Jim Crow proclamation that bathrooms that white people use are not for black people. We decide as a society and via our legal systems whom bathrooms are for. And we do so by examining considerations of fairness and the consequences of different arrangements. You mention one such consideration regarding the safety of cisgender women and girls, and I'll return to it. You don't trouble yourself to mention the safety of transgender women, who face real danger in men's bathrooms. You might ask yourself too how a trans man who looks just like a cis man (as most trans men apparently do) would fare in women's restrooms. P.S. The only study I'm aware of regarding cis man trying to pass as trans men in women's restrooms in order to harass or attack them found that there are no documented cases of this happening.
(c) I think locker rooms pose a more challenging case than restrooms. I do have sympathy for cis women and especially girls who are or would be unsettled by the sight of male genitalia in those settings (given that something like 90% of American transwomen have not had "bottom surgery"). Shower curtains are one solution. But we should always keep in mind that safety matters more than comfort.
(d) The unsupported proclamation that women's sports are for biological women faces similar difficulties; again the considerations of fairness and consequences that you ignore are crucial. The only real argument for the claim is that transwomen athletes have an unfair biological advantage over cis women athletes. I think this argument must be taken seriously and is indeed plausible. It's a complicated issue--much more complicated than most supporters seem to realize. The scientific debate over the biological-advantage issue has not, so far as I know, been resolved. (Similar debates have taken place, btw, concerning cis female athletes with naturally elevated testosterone levels. Many opponents of transfemale athletes in competitive women's sports seem not even to recognize that these athletes must take testosterone suppressants for several years in order to be allowed to compete. )
(e) I could go on for pages; I've given talks on the restroom and sports issues. But that's hardly appropriate here, and in any case I don't really want to spend the time. Indeed I've reached my limit in our debate. Perhaps it was unwise or even unfair for me to call you a bigot. But I get angry when marginalized people are thoughtlessly demeaned, and I feel dutibound to stand up for them. (For the record I also stand up for non-marginalized people, such as men under attack by misandrists, Jews under attack by antisemites, and white people under attack for being members of a "oppressor class".)
(f) Last words to you. Cheers.
> Let's be real: Elliot Page is a transman who looks like a biological man
Wait, which are we doing? Being "real" or making the second declaration? Page looks exactly like what he is, which is "a petite chick who has undergone major constructive surgery". Trying to oversell it the way you are loses the bid. He certainly hasn't achieved Buck Angel levels of transformation, and mastectomy scars aren't particularly masculine. At best, Page looks like a tween boy.
I made no such implication about my own comment. I made a “meta” comment about the use of “creepy,” which you later elaborated on. I did imply that we shouldn’t jump the moral gun and presuppose that any discussion of how one feels about classes of people is automatically bigotry = (for me) unthinking prejudice. You can’t avoid such “bigotry” yourself, automatically condemning Mr. Black Flag for his views as a bigot. He may be ultimately misguided, but shutting down discussion with absolute certainty is also unthinking and more patience is better. Your comment on his admittedly thoughtful discussion completely sidetracked the discussion.
People who think they're kittens or puppies or born in the wrong body are creepy, the same way that a mentally-ill homeless person covered in shit on the L Train is creepy. The left wants to degrade all of our evolved threat-detection capabilities and then run roughshod over us.
The idea that transgender identity is a mental illness is so profoundly ignorant that it qualifies as bigotry on steroids. Every major medical and psychological organization in the U.S. that has taken a stand on transgender identity has denied that it is a mental illness. I'm talking about the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics; likewise btw for the World Health Organization. And what exactly are your qualifications, baby daddy, for diagnosing transgender people? I should add that your evidence-free insinuation that trans people pose a threat just makes your bigotry worse.
These same groups endorsed lobotomies. As well as many useful medical procedures.
There is fashion in medicine and science, as elsewhere. But this is more basic, an argument about the nature of reality. It is no use calling everyone who disagrees with you a ‘bigot’. And saying so with long Latin-based words makes it no more use.
There's the nature of "reality" argument and there's the "mental illness" argument.
The interesting thing about "illness" is that we would normally agree that anything that prevents a person from reproducing would, broadly speaking, constitute a disease. If the desire to take take hormones to "fix" your body and thereby render yourself sterile isn't evidence of a disease, I don't know what is.
Right? I don’t get the appeal to authority from these bodies that have proven time and again to be fallible.
Your list proves less than you think. The American Psychiatric Association publishes the DSM, and gender dysphoria is in it, right now, in the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). What those organizations actually say is that being trans is not itself a disorder but the distress associated with it is a diagnosable condition. That is a real distinction, not the blanket denial you just described.
The WHO point cuts the same way. ICD-11 moved gender incongruence out of the mental disorders chapter, but it kept it as a diagnosis under conditions related to sexual health (World Health Organization, 2019). Reclassified, not removed. And the WHO said openly that retaining a code was necessary to preserve access to care, which is a coverage and financing rationale sitting alongside the scientific one.
Consensus statements are not evidence, they are summaries of it. Homosexuality left the DSM in 1973 after a process that involved a membership vote and sustained activist pressure, documented in detail by a sympathetic historian (Bayer, 1981). That was the right call. It was still a decision made by people, not a lab result. Citing that these bodies have taken a position tells me what they concluded, not why.
The consensus also is not global. England's independent review of youth gender services found the evidence base for pediatric medical transition weak and recommended extreme caution (Cass, 2024), and health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and Norway have tightened protocols after their own systematic reviews. Reasonable clinicians disagree.
Asking my credentials is not an argument. Neither is calling me a bigot. Address the claim
Your own initial examples and tone supported the bigotry charge. But let me indeed address your more thoughtful discussion in your reply. (a) Consensus statements are indeed evidence: indirect evidence to which nonspecialists can legitimately appeal. None of us, I'd wager, is a climate scientist, so we are wise to rely on the overwhelming climate-science consensus that humanly caused global warming is real. All this makes my request for your credentials relevant; but you're entitled of course to offer reasons for doubting the reliability of the consensus. (b) You're misunderstanding the consensus view on gender "dysphoria" (now called gender incongruence apparently to avoid an implication of mental illness for tran people generally). The dysphoria is produced by the existence of transgender identity in a hostile or unsympathetic society (including btw people like you). The dysphoria basically ends when the trans person is able to live in relative peace as a trans person. It matters that most people who transition don't regret it. (c) The pediatric concerns about YOUTH transitioning are entirely irrelevant to the point I have made about the mental healthiness of transgender identity in general. I think those concerns are reasonable, especially as raised in the Cass Report from England. I take no stand on whether trans youth should at least for now be denied access to puberty blockers, for instance. But I would note that Dr. Cass said explicitly that there are indeed trans youth who would benefit from transitioning when old enough to make an informed decision. She NEVER claims or implies that transgender identity is a mental illness. I do think she's right that social contagion explains some of the popularity of youthful identifications of biological girls and boys as trans. (d) Lab reports, so far as I know, have nothing to do with the issue of whether transgender identity is a mental illness. (e) It's heartening to see you reject the traditional view of homosexuality as a mental illness. Two points about it: we can call that view a social prejudice, and thus a form of bigotry, when it was and is based on indefensible misconceptions (typically quite ugly) about gay people. Sure, psychologists often accepted them too. But the few arguments for the view were godawful, and there is reason to think that the psychologists were influenced by the social prejudices. (Precisely the same point applies to the very common racism in psychology.) I do nevertheless find myself wondering if you would have mocked gay people back before the early 1970s' psychologists' renunciation of the mental-lllness claim about them. Judging from your earlier anti-trans mockery, the answer would seem to be yes. If you want others to avoid that conclusion, dude, skip the mockery--and not just for your sake but from compassion for its targets.....